Getting the most out of AI with Craft CMS

Craft CMS is a foundation your site builds on. And when it comes to being ready for the AI generation of websites, it's pretty much as good as they come.

The core design philosophy of Craft CMS has (either by accident or by remarkable foresight), made it very competent for this next generation of websites. The decisions they've made over the last decade with how content is structured, the APIs that make content reachable, and how extendable it is make it a very solid foundation to build an AI-friendly and AI-enhanced website.

The question isn't so much whether Craft is well suited to AI (it is) but whether your developers are getting the most out of it.

Why the foundation works so well

Craft is a highly structured CMS where content is modelled around what it is (e.g. a "case study", a "staff bio", a "product"), not just generic pages.

Let's compare it with WordPress. Out of the box, WordPress stores the body of a page as a single field of HTML. You can add structure to a WordPress site with custom fields but it's something you bolt on rather than the way the platform natively works.

This lack of structure and semantic meaning is a tricky editing experience and also it means doing useful things with that content is more difficult.

One area where having your content modelled well pays off is schema, the structured data (schema.org, usually as JSON-LD) that tells search and answer engines what a page actually holds. It can explain to engines that "this isn't just a page: this describes a product that has a 4 star review, it's in stock and it costs £50 and here are some FAQs that go along with it".

Schema is only ever as good as the content beneath it. When your data already sits in clean, labelled fields, it can map to an accurate Schema really quite easily. But when it's buried in a single lump of HTML, you're reverse-engineering meaning that was never made explicit in the first place. It's easy to ignore, get wrong, get outdated, and cost disproportionate time and money to keep up with.

Craft gives you the former, which is the difference between telling an engine what your page is and hoping it guesses right. Increasingly it's the schema-reading engines that decide whether you turn up in an AI answer at all.

Also, Craft's native headless capabilities mean that the content can be easily decoupled from its presentation, so Craft can power a site, an iPhone app, and these days - things like Chatbots too. Its extensible APIs allow you to elevate your site with things like chatbots, personalisation, semantic search, and AI-assisted content production.

The craft of building sites with a strong information architecture has never been more important. Craft's structured approach, versus piecing together a WordPress theme or Webflow site pays off because increasingly what pages mean matters more than what they look like. 

On the development side

A few years back, before the AI boom, Craft made a major change to how sites were built. Instead of all of the settings being in a database somewhere, they became codified. All of the fields, channels, and settings are stored in files on the site. 

As a site owner, you never even need to know that these files exist, but it means that a good development team can now read and reason about your site's setup directly, which makes building and changing it faster and less prone to mistakes.

Other CMSs often keep much of that configuration in a database a tool can't easily and cheaply inspect.

An agency that has kept up can simply do more for you, in less time.

What "the work" actually is

When it comes to building on the foundations of Craft, it's split into two pillars: making your site better for AI, and making your site better with AI.

Making your site better for AI

Structure comes first. Fields still need setting up sensibly rather than dumping everything into one editor, and pages need real semantic HTML underneath: proper headings, lists and landmarks. This is where the biggest wins usually are. If a screen reader can follow your content, a model usually can too. This is something a developer will probably need to lead for you.

Serve clean content to crawlers. AI agents increasingly arrive asking for a tidy version of a page rather than the full rendered site, and the way they ask is a technical signal in the request itself. Answer it well and the model gets your actual content instead of your navigation and scripts; ignore it and the model does its best with the markup and often gets you wrong. Our Mutual One platform handles this for you, detecting those agents and serving them clean, structured content automatically.

Keep llms.txt in proportion. You'll hear a lot about LLMs.txt. Google has said they don't currently read the file, so it isn't a ranking lever there but there's evidence it's used elsewhere. Generating one costs almost nothing and sets you up if that changes, which is why Mutual One creates and maintains yours automatically and we then leave it at that. Putting it in is unlikely to change things too much today, but there's not much of a good reason not to have one either. Again, a good developer will be able to do this for you.

Get schema and metadata in order. Structured data and clean meta descriptions help classic search and answer engines alike. AI-written summaries of long articles can help: a short, accurate summary at the top of a page can double as a meta description and tells an engine what the page is about. Plus, it's probably useful for users too!

Watch what's crawling you. GPTBot and ClaudeBot are almost certainly on your site already, maybe even surpassing Google's interactions with your site. We've covered how we spot them in the Mutual One platform separately, and it's worth checking with your developers how you can keep an eye on it too.

Making your site better with AI

There's also lots of ways to use AI to assist with content management on your site. Our Mutual One platform on Craft CMS provides a lot of tools for AI out of the box, but much of it can be achieved with custom development and plugins too.

For example, Mutual One provides:

• Automatic alt text written for every image you upload
• Automatically sets the focal point for images uploaded, so you don't accidentally crop somebody's head off!
• Grammar and clarity checks in the CMS
• Automated content summaries
• Accessibility reviews
• SEO Keyword analysis review and recommendations
• Audience lens: give it a persona and a goal, say a time-poor procurement manager comparing three suppliers, and it reviews the page as that person and tells you exactly where it falls short for them
• And loads more

We use Craft as the foundation for our Mutual One platform sites precisely because it gives us the cleanest, most reliable base to build on.

We can add the Mutual One platform to existing Craft CMS websites, even if we didn't build it. If you want to see how we can elevate your Craft site, check it out.

It's about to get more native

One of the headline sessions at the upcoming Dot One event in London for Craft 6 is an MCP server for Craft. In plain terms, that's a way to point a tool like Claude or ChatGPT straight at your site and have it help manage things. The platform is quietly moving towards something you can operate by asking, not just by clicking.

This is ongoing, not a one-off

None of this is a job you do once. It's why the Mutual One Platform is part of our on-going support plans, it's constantly changing so we add and improve features monthly.

The conventions are settling as we speak, new crawlers appear, the advice on llms.txt has already changed more times than I can remember, and the tooling changes month to month.

How the Mutual One platform helps

Instead of sourcing, configuring and maintaining a stack of separate tools, keeping up with a moving target - with everything else on your plate, our Mutual One platform provides a single place to supercharge your Craft CMS website's marketing capabilities.

It's a platform built into your Craft site that brings the AI, SEO, accessibility and analytics tools together in one place, managed by us and kept current, so "AI-ready" stays true. 

If you own a Craft website, you should be assured that your site has good bones.

The question isn't whether Craft is good for AI, it's whether your developers are making the most out of it for you. The good news is that this is an emerging discipline, and if you're a bit behind there's plenty of time to catch up and your developers will be able to help.

If you're interested in working with us to make AI work for your site, let's chat or you can take our free quiz to get a site health check score and we'll help you get there.